Look it up: Noah Webster's famous dictionary was written in New Haven (video)

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NEW HAVEN -- Noah Webster made his fortune in New York, but he created his legend in New Haven.

A Yale graduate, Webster had published the nation's first daily newspaper and written a spelling book, but he returned to New Haven to fulfill his dream of writing the first American dictionary.

Biographer Joshua Kendall picks up the story: "He buys the fanciest house in town, which is located ... on Water Street. ... He got a good price for it because the house was tainted by shame. The house used to belong to Benedict Arnold."

Yes, the father of the dictionary bought the house once owned by the young nation's most famous traitor.

New Haven history is full of such nuggets, going back to the days when the Founding Fathers walked the streets. One was George Washington, who stopped in the city in 1775 on his way to command the Continental Army. Another was Webster, or so Kendall contends in his new biography, "The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster's Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture."

Kendall, a freelance writer and Yale alumnus who lives in Boston, will give a lecture and sign his new book at the New Haven Museum and Historical Society April 21. His first book, "The Man Who Made Lists," was about Peter Mark Roget, who published the world's best-known thesaurus.

"This is my dream job; I love biography," Kendall said as he toured several Webster-related sites in New Haven last month. He was in town to speak at Yale's Trumbull College, where he is an associate fellow.

"This project was very appealing to me; it made me reconnect with Yale and my own history," he said.

Kendall says he identifies with Webster as someone who struck out on his own to fulfill a dream. "He wanted to be a writer and he figured out a way to do it, and I always found that part of him very exciting."

A PARADE FOR WASHINGTON

Webster, who was born in West Hartford in 1758 and died in 1843, is buried in Grove Street Cemetery, one plot over from inventor Eli Whitney.

Of the three places in New Haven where Webster lived, one still stands: Connecticut Hall on Yale's Old Campus, which was a dormitory when Webster arrived in 1774. He and his father traveled from Hartford, one riding a horse and the other walking, though it's uncertain who did what.

"The big event of his freshman year was the day that George Washington came to town" in June 1775, Kendall said. The general was staying at the Beers Tavern at Chapel and College streets, where the Taft Apartments (formerly the Hotel Taft) stands. It served as an inn, bookstore and general store -- the center of Elm City intellectual life.

According to Kendall's book, the Yale militia, with Webster playing "Yankee Doodle Dandy" on his flute, joined by other units, escorted Washington two miles on his way out of town.

After graduation, Webster taught and practiced law, a profession that didn't suit him, then eventually went to New York and started a newspaper to promote the Federalists, the party of John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, which called for a strong central government.

He also wrote the American Spelling Book, published in 1783, "and that was a huge success and sold 100 million copies by the beginning of the 20th century, and that's really what developed his understanding of American English and that unified the country behind the language," Kendall says.

Financially secure, Webster returned to New Haven.

"He's very frail, he's a very nervous guy and he says, 'Gee, I've made a lot of money, now I can do what I've always wanted to do and that's write a dictionary,'" according to Kendall. "If he didn't have a dictionary to work on he might have had a nervous breakdown."

Benedict Arnold's house at 155 Water St. "had all the accoutrements of the day, including a second outhouse," Kendall says. At the time, Water Street was aptly named, running along the harbor. Now, the address is a blank-faced United Illuminating warehouse, sitting between a Mexican restaurant and a building covered in street art.

Webster loved New Haven for its libraries, its beauty and its layout of nine squares. "New Haven was called the Eden of America in those days," Kendall says. After publishing a small dictionary in 1806, he began his major project with the letter "A."

"I found that manuscript in the New Haven Museum where he says one morning he got up and said, now it's time to begin writing," says Kendall.

TO AMHERST AND BACK

As tensions with Britain escalated in the early 19th century, and the economy weakened, Webster and his family moved to Amherst, Mass., but returned in 1822. He rented a house, then built his own on Temple Street near Wall Street, where Yale's Silliman College stands. Webster's house was moved to Greenfield Village, Mich.

Comfortably back in New Haven, surrounded by his alma mater, Webster worked on his dictionary, then he started getting grander ideas.

"He goes to England and initially there's not a lot of interest in the dictionary because (Samuel) Johnson's dictionary is so popular," Kendall says. "And he's thinking of writing a unified dictionary of British and American English, out of desperation, and ... he tries to set up a conference between Oxford, Cambridge (universities) and him to come up with this new dictionary, but that plan also flops."

Back in New Haven, "he publishes the American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828 and the reviews are fantastic. It doesn't sell a lot; it sells about 2,500 copies, but the abridged version sells quite well, and he ... does very well."

After Webster died in 1843, half the Yale faculty continued to work on the dictionary. "Webster didn't quite get etymology right, but everything is fixed by 1864, and that's really the rough draft of the Oxford English Dictionary," considered the most comprehensive English dictionary in the world, says Kendall.

"What's not well known is that New Haven was the world capital of English lexicography in the mid-19th century, after Webster's death," says Kendall. A Yale medical student named W.C. Minor worked on both the 1864 edition of Webster's American dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary.

"I'm sort of obsessed with obsessives," says Kendall, those who, like Roget and Webster, succeed by directing their obsession to accomplish something great. His next book, he says, will be about seven such people, including aviator Charles Lindbergh and Boston Red Sox star Ted Williams. It's called "America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy that Built a Nation."

Like Webster, who was obsessed with words, or Lindbergh, whose compulsive list-making resulted in aviation safety checklists, "the quirks often cement the legend," says Kendall.

For Webster, the legend is cemented in New Haven, where his name will forever be linked to the dictionary he created.

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